THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'Ask your father to telephone and find out.'

'You mustn't mention a word of this to Papa,' she exclaimed, delightfully flustered.

Gerda saw my invitation as a serious matter with serious implications. She seemed not to have-or she did not dare to have-any casual men friends. She was thought in the tail of childhood, in an age when marriage was an excitement preserved until the third decade, when contraception was unreliable, unobtainable and unmentionable, when abortion carried a prison sentence and the maidenhead had not yet suffered the fate of much else and become disposable. Relations between men and women were wary and ceremonious, sex a delicate dish rather than a staple diet. Such attitudes were particularly strong in the middle-classes, in Catholics, in Germany and in girls like Gerda.

She added, 'Of course, Herr Elgar, I enjoy discussing international politics with you, because you are intelligent and have been to Cambridge University. But I thought you regarded me as a sensible woman, whom you could talk to in a dispassionate way.'

'That's precisely why I want to ask you to the pictures.'

'But I almost never go the cinema,' she said, by way of another objection.

'In one so seriously-minded as yourself, Frдulein Dieffenbach,' I countered, 'self-denial is but another pleasure.'

'As you insist, I shall ask Mama if it would be all right,' she said more cheerfully, shifting responsibility.

I was calmly confident. I had noticed how she generally contrived to take the same Schwebebahn to work every morning as myself.

4

This is a story of drugs, not politics. I am a biochemist, not a historian. But it is also the story of a coincidence, which occurred in Germany over thirty-seven days astride Silversterabend, New Year's Eve, 1933.

The second of these dates was Monday, January 30, 1933. The better schooled of my present biochemistry students in London can identify it as the day which ushered Adolf Hitler to power, and so comparable with St Peter's Day 1338, when the buboes of the Black Death first festered upon Englishmen among the sailors of Melcombe Regis in Dorset. The earlier date was December 24, 1932. Even my fellow-professors can remember nothing in particular about that Christmas Eve. Which suggests that the evil of the 1930s lives after them, the good was interred with the hurried riddance of their bones.

The cauldron of German democracy, which had been simmering fitfully for fourteen years since its flame was lit in the haunts of Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, came furiously to the boil that Saturday when I first met Gerhard Domagk. And nobody realized that the brew was already poisoned. No party had a majority in the Reichstag, though the Nazis-which was slang, to match 'Sozi' for Socialist-were the biggest, after advancing sensationally to 230 seats in the elections of the previous July. They always seemed to be having elections in Germany. During the past year, the Rhineland had seen five-two for the reinstatement of President Hindenburg, another for a Prussian parliament which vanished almost immediately in a local _coup d'йtat,_ and two more for the Reichstag. They were neither the decorous cricket match contests of England nor the raucous carnivals of America. They were violent, bloody and murderous. Since the collapse of Hermann Mailer's coalition government in 1930, there was still democracy in Germany. But it was democracy gone mad, like a man gripped with mania, who performs life's normal functions of sitting, standing and speaking with a fury which seems liable to tear him to pieces.

Over the same period, Berlin had seen three Reich chancellors. The austere Catholic Heinrich Brьning had been ousted in May by a fifty-four year old political dilettante, the 'gentleman showjumper' Franz von Papen, lion faced and serpent hearted. His name was already known to the world, from being thrown out of Washington early in the Great War, a neutral diplomat trying to blow up the United States railroads. The gentleman showjumper recruited other gentlemen to his 'Barons' Cabinet' from the fashionable Herrenklub in the Vosstrasse of Berlin, as British prime ministers enlisted their schoolfriends from Eton. But before Christmas, sly von Papen was outfoxed by the affable, sharp-nosed, portly 'Socialist General' Kurt von Schleicher, whose name in German meant 'Artful Dodger', very appropriately.

To discredit his predecessor, Chancellor von Schleicher fired the haystack of the Osthilfe scandal, which had diverted millions of marks for 'agricultural relief in East Prussia into the pockets of the estate-owning Junkers. But as so hearteningly happens in politics, the flames had blown back on him. That Saturday morning he had resigned after fifty-seven days of office, in which he complained he had been betrayed fifty-seven times. The same Saturday the Government of France fell too, even more precociously, a sinister coincidence for the sore continent of Europe.

All weekend Berlin wriggled with intrigue like a fisherman's tin of worms, from which a new Imperial Chancellor had needs to be pulled by the President. Field-Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was phlegmatic, narrow, devious, benevolent, fearsomely moustached, the eternal victor of Tannenberg over the Russians in the first months of the Great War, the heroic embodiment of Militafromm-his countrymen's exasperating awe of the sword. Hindenburg had displaced the first President of the brand-new Republic, Friedrich Ebert. He was put up to the job by his old crony Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, who felt the country would be better presided over by a shade from the Hohenzollern monarchy than a saddler from Heidelberg. Hindenburg was voted to power by Germans with no love of a republic at any price, he had officiated for eight years impartially, incorruptibly and ineffectively, and his mind was now dimmed with the mists of eighty-six winters.

At eleven-thirty on the Monday morning-half an hour late through a last-minute squabble over the tantalizingly ripened fruits of office-a ragbag of politicians trooped from the room of State Secretary Otto von Meissner to the audience chamber of the Presidential Palace in Berlin. Only three of the dozen were Nazis, all subdued in dark suits. There was the beetle-browed shy policeman Wilhelm Frick, who had spied on his own headquarters at Munich. Hermann Gцring, with a pearl tie-pin. And Adolf Hitler, displaying nothing more minatory than a party badge in his lapel.

The gentleman showjumper Franz von Papen did the honours of introduction. The President leaning on his stick, grown pettishly impatient, vitalized the new Imperial Cabinet by breathing upon it a few platitudes. He had still to appoint his new Chancellor. The office had been the gift of Kaiser Wilhelm, the Weimar constitution had subjected it to the Reichstag, but there were hands ready to twist the constitution into any desired shape. The appointment was open to doubt until sealed by the oath of office. Goebbels and the other top Nazis were waiting in the nearby Kaiserhof Hotel, extremely nervously. Only the previous Thursday, Hindenburg had sworn again that he would never invest with the mantle of Bismarck a Bohemian corporal. He never even offered Hitler a chair when he called.

But Hindenburg saw the corporal as a prisoner in a coalition. He would be defused. He would be disposed of. Only a fortnight previously, von Schleicher had declared Hitler no longer a danger, nor even a political problem, but a thing of the past. So had the Socialist messiah Harold Laski in London. The corporal became the Chancellor. Later, he became the President. He was the last before Adenauer. In between, the world entered times when God and his saints slept, as men once said about those of King Stephen.

I was unaware of stepping across three days which shakily bridged the new Europe from the old. I was far more concerned taking Gerda to the pictures. This was partly because the trivia of human existence continue with the resilience of human life itself. And partly because citizens of the British Empire had the reputation for walking the world with an air of supreme indifference towards the natives.

We went to the cinema the following Thursday night. Gerda changed from her habitual serge to a blue and white cotton dress in bold stripes reaching almost to her ankles, which I self-flatteringly suspected to be new and perhaps even bought for the occasion. A small round fur-trimmed hat turned her disquietingly from a good-looking schoolmistress to a pretty girl. The family and the two maids gathered in the hall to wave us off. We might have been starting on our honeymoon.

We took the Schwebebahn for ten stops to the Old Market station across at Barmen. We found the market square itself packed with an excited crowd. There was another Nazi demonstration, a march of the Sturmabteilungen, the SA, Hitler's Storm Troopers, the Brownshirts. Germany had been locked for years in a brawl of private armies, the Sturmabteilungen against the Communists' Rote Frontkampfer, squads of the ex-Servicemen's Stahlhelm and the Social Democrats' Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold waiting to be at somebody's throat in the